By the mid-1700s Poland, once one of the largest and among the most powerful states in Europe, had succumbed to its own decentralized political structure and its neighbors' ambitions. By century's end, Prussia, Russia, and Austria had conquered and partitioned the country, thrusting each partition onto its own separate path from semifeudal agrarianism to modernized, commercial agriculture.
Early Immigration
Polish society was neither static nor self-contained. In 1608, a few itinerant Polish artisans became America's first Polish settlers when they joined the Jamestown colony. Recruited to produce soap, tar, and pitch, they left their mark on Virginia political history by resisting a 1619 attempt by the House of Burgesses to disenfranchise them. Protestant "Polanders" also had settled in colonial New Amsterdam and in Pennsylvania. The American Revolution also benefited from a few talented Polish nobles of democratic sympathies, like General Casimir Pulaski ("Father of the American Cavalry"), who was slain at the Battle of Savannah (1779), and General Thaddeus Ko[UNK]ciuszko, a military engineer whose fortifications contributed decisively to the American victory at the Battle of Saratoga (1777). Kos[UNK]ciuszko also wrote the first U.S. army artillery manual. Ko[UNK]ciuszko's will, eventually superseded, bequeathed his American estate to free and educate African American slaves. Although numerically insignificant, these early Polish arrivals established later Polish immigrants' claims to authenticity as Americans.
Polish settlement in the United States became numerically noteworthy only after the 1830s, when scattered veterans of a succession of failed Polish insurrections against foreign rule fled to the United States during Europe's "Springtime of Nations." Even then, this "Great Emigration" only numbered a thousand or so individuals who dispersed widely and assimilated easily, although it did establish the first Polish American periodicals, literary societies, and the political groups that laid the groundwork for a Polish nationalist movement in the United States. Nationalist aspirations knit Poles together at home and abroad, but concurrently raised divisive issues. Although the majority of their inhabitants were Roman Catholics and ethnic Poles, the Polish partitions contained sizeable ethnic minorities—Jews, Ukrainians, and Germans. Polish nationalists debated whether Polish identity would be pluralistic, civic, and secular, or based on ethnicity and religion.
Years of Mass Migration
With the gradual capitalist transformation and "modernization" of the Polish countryside after the 1850s, Polish immigration to the United States (and elsewhere) increased. Author and Nobel laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz (1905) remarked that Poles came "in search of bread and freedom," but the majority probably came more for economic reasons. The Polish mass migration "for bread" (za chlebem) brought about 2.5 million ethnic Poles (including regional subgroups like the Kashubes and the Górale, or Tatra highlanders) to the United States from the 1850 to 1920. (This figure includes 434,000 "German Poles" from the German-held Polish partition, who came primarily from 1850 to 1900; 800,000 "Austrian Poles" from the Austrian-held Polish partition, who arrived between 1880 and 1920; and 805,000 "Russian Poles" from the Russian-held Polish partition, who immigrated from 1890 to 1920). Up to 30 percent of the Austrian and Russian Poles did not remain in the United States, returning to their land of origin. Although the immigrants included Poles of all classes, most had rural, typically peasant, backgrounds, were young, disproportionately male, and unmarried. Immigrant Poles entered many occupations including farming (a mere 10 percent), shopkeeping, the professions, skilled labor, and the arts; but fully 80 percent took semiskilled and unskilled jobs in mass production and heavy industry—coal mining, oil refining, steelmaking, meatpacking, and textiles, electrical goods, and auto manufacture.
Community Building
Rural Panna Maria, Texas, generally is recognized as the first Polish settlement (1854) of the era of the peasant mass migration, but most Poles settled in northeastern and midwestern towns and cities. (Chicago had the second largest Polish population of any city; only Warsaw boasted greater numbers of Poles.) Polish immigrants concentrated in the industrial belt that extended from Boston to Philadelphia and westward across New York and Pennsylvania, through Pittsburgh, northern Ohio, and northern Indiana, to Chicago and Milwaukee. Social dislocations they experienced were amply documented in William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918–1920), the classic work of the "Chicago school" of sociology. Nevertheless, the Polish immigrant community—"Polonia" (Latin for Poland), as these enclaves individually and collectively were known—became vital centers of immigrant social life, with immigrant small businesses, press, theater, and a network of athletic, cultural, political, and fraternal benevolent associations. The heart of Polonia, however, was its Polish Roman Catholic parishes, (peaking at over 800 in the 1930s). With many established by the Polish Resurrectionist order, these parishes (with their parochial schools and teaching nuns like the Felicians) provided cradle-to-grave social services, encapsulated immigrant spiritual and aesthetic life (best merged, perhaps, in images of Our Lady of C[UNK]stochowa, Poland's "Black Madonna") and (with the largest numbering over 40,000 parishioners) gave rise to Polonia's first great leaders, priests like Chicago's Rev. Wincenty Barzy[UNK]ski, C.R.
Religious and Political Affairs
During the years of mass migration, Polonia's main rival fraternal organizations, the secularist Polish National Alliance (1880) and the religionist Polish Roman Catholic Union (1873), argued and then compromised on Polish American ethnic identity: Polish and Roman Catholic. The linkage of Roman Catholicism and Polishness (Polsko[UNK][UNK]) increasingly influenced nationalist politics in Poland into the twentieth century. Insurrectionary veteran Rev. Joseph D[UNK]browski established a Polish Roman Catholic seminary in Detroit in 1883 to provide a patriotic ethnic clergy, while other Poles, led by Rev. Wenceslaus Kruszka, argued for representation and equality within the heavily Irish church hierarchy, succeeding modestly with the consecration of Paul Rhode as the first Polish American Roman Catholic bishop (1908). Immigrant religious participation was not without contention. Between the 1890s and 1920s, immigrant lay-trusteeism and Polish nationalism produced the most important schism yet to rock American Roman Catholicism, climaxing in the 1904 founding of the Polish National Catholic Church by Scranton, Pennsylvania, priest Francis Hodur. Following World War I, the Polish nationalist movement also achieved its central goal, as pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski and others won the support of the administration of President Woodrow Wilson for the reestablishment of a united, sovereign, independent Poland. Poland came into being again in 1918, with its existence confirmed by the Treaty of Versailles (1919).
Involved in the Progressive Era's labor movement and radical politics (a Polish anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, assassinated President William McKinley in 1901), Polish workers played a key role in the 1930s and 1940s in the rise of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) and other mass production unions associated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations. In the heroic 1935–1937 period, Poles and other Slavs were fully a quarter of the membership. Polish Americans overwhelmingly supported President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democratic Party in the 1930s, a loyalty shaken by the Yalta Agreement (1945) which, after World War II, stripped Poland of territory, left it a Soviet satellite, and gave rise to fifty years of Polish American anticommunism championed by Polonia's new umbrella political body, the Polish American Congress (1944).
Post–world War II Migration
After World War II, new waves of immigrants from Poland reshaped the Polish presence in the United States. Between 1945 and 1956, over 190,000 political exiles and displaced persons came to the United States. From 1965 to 1990, about 178,000 entered after the liberalization of Polish migration policies (1956), political crackdowns in Poland (1968), and passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. During the same period roughly 957,000 nonimmigrant temporary visitors came, many of whom stayed and obtained work. Between 1983 and 1990, about 35,000 entered; these were political refugees from the Solidarity (Solidarno[UNK][UNK]) movement, the Polish trade union movement and democratization campaign. Census figures for 2000 estimate the Polish American population (persons either from Poland or identifying Polish as a principal ancestry) at about 9 million, or about 3.3 percent of the national total. The states with the largest Polish American population are New York (958,893), Illinois (946,241), and Michigan (900,335). Other states with sizeable Polish American populations include Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Ohio, Wisconsin, California, and Florida. The large Polish American presence in California and Florida resulted from late-twentieth-century secondary migrations.
Contemporary Polish America
As an ethnic group, Polish Americans experienced mixed fortunes in America after World War II. With a high rate of home ownership, older urban Polonias tended to remain in place despite changing urban racial composition. Nonetheless suburban out-migration, intermarriage, language loss, assimilation, and upward mobility have undercut ethnic group numbers and identification. Polish Americans have moved into managerial, professional, and technical occupations, while the mass marketing of such traditional Polish food items like p[UNK]czki (doughnuts) and pierogi (filled dumplings) symbolized their cultural "arrival." The white ethnic revival of the late 1960s heightened ethnic consciousness for some Polish Americans who also felt considerable ethnic pride when Karol Cardinal Wojty[UNK]a became the first Polish pope, John Paul II (1978), and Solidarity leader Lech W[UNK][UNK]sa led a non-violent revolution for democracy in Poland in the early 1980s. Polish Americans who have attained national recognition in contemporary American culture include television actress Loretta Swit (M*A*S*H), athletic figures like basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski and baseball star Stan "The Man" Musial, homemaking doyenne Martha Stewart (neé Kostyra), and émigré Nobel laureate Czes[UNK]aw Mi[UNK]osz.
Despite such successes, Polish Americans continue to score low in "social status" rankings owing to persistent anti-Polish stereotyping, particularly in the media, which has inspired antidefamation campaigns. Contemporary Polish American politics also have focused on cultural survival issues, Polish membership in NATO (achieved in 1999), relations with post-socialist Poland, and improvement in Polish-Jewish relations, historically a difficult issue. In postwar national politics, Polish American visibility peaked when Maine Senator Edmund Muskie (Marciszewski) won the Democratic Party vice presidential nomination (1968) and Zbigniew Brzezinski was named as President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser (1976); but "realigned" Polish American voters increasingly voted for Republican candidates after 1968. In the opening years of the twenty-first century, the most prominent Polish-American political figure was Senator Barbara Mikulski (D., Md.).
Besides the older fraternal associations, the principal Polish American organizations today include the Polish American Congress, the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America and the Kos´ciuszko Foundation (both in New York City), the Polish Museum of America (Chicago), the Polish American Historical Association, the American Council for Polish Culture, the Polish American Journal (Buffalo, N.Y.), the Polish Genealogical Society of America, and St. Mary's College of Ave Maria University (Orchard Lake, Michigan). Contemporary Polish American writers include Anthony Bukoski, Stuart Dybek, Gary Gildner, Leslie Pietrzyk, and Suzanne Strempek Shea.
Bibliography
Bukowczyk, John J. And My Children Did Not Know Me: A History of the Polish Americans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Bukowczyk, John J., ed. Polish Americans and Their History: Community, Culture, and Politics. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996.
Davies, Norman. God's Playground: A History of Poland. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
Greene, Victor. "Poles." In Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, edited by Stephan Thernstrom. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980.
Gladsky, Thomas S. Princes, Peasants, and Other Polish Selves: Ethnicity in American Literature. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.
Pula, James S. Polish Americans: An Ethnic Community. New York: Twayne, 1995.
Silverman, Deborah Anders. Polish-American Folklore. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Encyclopedia of American History Copyright © 2006 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
